What Makes a Person Liable to Defensive Harm?

Abstract

On Jeff McMahan's influential ‘responsibility account’ of moral liability to defensive killing, one can forfeit one's right not be killed by engaging in an ordinary, morally permissible risk‐imposing activity, such as driving a car. If, through no fault of hers, a driver's car veers out of control and toward a pedestrian, the account deems it no violation of the driver's right to save the pedestrian's life at the expense of the driver's life. Many critics reject the responsibility account on the grounds that, first, it has draconian implications for threateners like the driver, and second, it contravenes the plausible principle that wronging one's victim is necessary for forfeiting one's rights. But I argue, drawing on the account's luck‐egalitarian underpinnings, that (1) the account lacks the draconian implications widely attributed to it, and (2) contrary to what many assume, wrongdoing is unnecessary for rights‐forfeiture. Via these arguments, I seek both to deepen our understanding of the responsibility account, and to reissue it in a more plausible and attractive form.

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